The March of Ive

The prospect of Jonathan Ive vs Malcolm Garrett in this month’s Creative Review magazine was appealing, to say the least. Ive won the magazine’s snappily-titled "which single person or team do you admire most in the creative industries" award this year, and legendary graphic designer and long-standing Mac-advocate Malcolm Garrett got to interview him.

But it’s a very strange interview, as Garrett admits, as Ive didn’t really say much at all – partly due to the fact that any of his personal interests are likely to be industrial secrets linked to Apple’s share price, but partly as Ive seems uncomfortable in the spotlight, like any good designer ought to be. He seems particularly keen to credit his team, and the ethos of working in a team – quite rightly of course, imho, though he doesn’t give any names or shed any further light on them.

Anyway, there’s a few interesting quotations (below) on Apple’s product design function, as well as some asides that I haven’t bothered to retype for y’all (bizarrely, there doesn’t seem to be any clear link up with the MacOS designers. Garrett alludes to Apple’s long time, "well known in the industry", but little publicised search for a Head of Graphic Design to work along Ive plus team).

"We have a really clear understanding of the aspects of the products that we need to know about to do our job well and working very closely with the engineers, I would say we have an unusually in-depth understanding of whether it’s, say, the thermal architecture of our product, or whether it’s EMI emissions (Electromagnetic interference omissions which may interfere with other electronic equipment) and so on. That’s one of the reasons why I think we can achieve what we achieve and again we can only do that through being in-house. We really do spend so much time trying to understand the core issues. We don’t legislate a design and just somehow get it to work, you know, we really are genuinely trying to wrestle with the fundamentals, the challenges of the product, and in a very fluid sort of way … developing the materials, the processes associated with making a certain part, working with the structure, working with issues around mass, centre of gravity. We don’t try and define a sort of "it needs to looks like this" and figure it out; we do it the other way round."

[DH: Interesting as to integrating their technical and design function very tightly – engineers working alongside designers very closely indeed; something I, and many others, have advocated in terms of new media design.]

"I think Apple is an unusual position because we can control and define both hardware and software. The iPod is a really nice example of their seamless integration. It’s being really clear in terms of the architecture of a product at a fundamental level. It’s designed very specifically as a product that works with the Mac… What isn’t immediately obvious is that a lot of the success of the iPod is because it was designed with a thorough understanding of its position within a broader system. You’ve got a keyboard and a mouse and a display for you to do the administrative stuff within iTunes… (W)ith the iPod it’s about navigating, not about manipulating or moving data of any sort. It’s about navigating as intuitively and as quickly as possible."

[DH: Interesting, seeing a product as part of a wider ecology of products or informational services.]

"(Our design team) is very small. One of the things that’s really valuable is that we have worked together for a long time and our focus is design. It sounds really obvious, but I think it’s frightening how much time designers can spend not actually designing."

[DH: Tell me about it! Again, the importance of a small team, and focused work.]

"JI: We’re trying to design better products. Sometimes we get them more right than others. That’s the goal. The goal isn’t to be different. The goal isn’t to be new. The goal is to do it well and to design better products. If they are new, or if they are different then that’s a consequence, but it’s not the goal.
MG: There are absolutely no gimmicks, no frills. Just bare essentials and those special details such as the breathing light. Not absolutely necessary, but wonderful.
JI: That comes from how you describe functionally imperative or necessary. If the function of that indicator is to indicate well a certain state then the wave of fluid behaviour is a much more effective way of describing a sleep state… We’re trying to figure out your connection to the product."

[DH: Echoes of new rationalism here.]